18 December: Women’s Day

I wanted to write a song about the February Revolution using actual phrases from Trotsky’s awesome History of the Russian Revolution. A hard challenge, and it took ages and ages, and when I had finally nearly finished I realised: this is crap. It was too hard. So it sat on a hard drive for two years, and I pulled the pieces together yesterday so as at least to put it out there. Maybe the couple of bits that do work can be extracted for use in another song.

Not many people seem to know (I didn’t till I started reading Trotksy — the newspapers were calling Corbynistas ‘Trots’, so I though I better find out more) that the Russian Revolution was sparked by a strike of textile workers on International Women’s Day 1917. The Bolsheviks had nothing to do with it, and if anything they were trying to stop the women going on strike in case it annoyed the Tsar.